*****
One of the biggest problems with the struggle to achieve Equal Marriage is that, right back at the start, when the evil John Howard actually passed legislation banning Equal Marriage, there was an opportunity to register a protest and challenge that law. The main opposition party at the time, however, meekly and subserviently acquiesced - and it was later discovered that they had consulted with same sex advocates who had abused their position by promulgating their personal hate of any sort of marriage, not for a moment thinking that same sex/same gender relationships would be the victims.
At around the same time, there was at least one trans advocate who, in the quest for a widening of the anti-discrimination provisions around gender identity documents [Note 1] to include the non-operative parts of the gender continuum, as well those who - for financial and/or medical reasons - may not be able to have surgery (which has been particularly problematic for, for instance, F2Ms - see here for some terminology), tried to argue that surgery was "wrong", and created - in effect - "freaks". It was offensive - not only to post-operative trans people, but also to their partners, who were also being subsumed into some sort of morally reprehensible "freak-hood". The person concerned claimed it was "a political tactic", but it was stupid, regressive, and EXTREMELY harmful to sections of the TGD community. Their intentions were undoubtedly good (the neochristians have a saying about that), but the result was discriminatory - it was a case of unintended discrimination, or, to use a more colourful turn of words, perhaps we could term it as "accidental hate".
The wrong of the hate of the Department of Births, Deaths and Marriages is now likely to be overcome - after almost two decades of suffering on our side, and nothing of any gain on theirs.
This is GREAT news, but . . . the media release refers to surgery in a slightly derogatory way. Is someone still promulgating hate, or only a part of the picture?
When you're on the receiving end of so much bigotry for so long, it is understandable that people may resort to any tactic at all to achieve their aims, but when it is done at the expense of other people (as, for instance, was the case with the trans advocate who tried to use brain research to wrongly shunt trans people into the category of intersex [Note 2] - thereby trivialising their valid needs and making the accomplishment of their needs harder, just as those who respond to the "Black Lives Matter" with the trivialising and diluting 'all lives matter' rubbish also do ), it is wrong, and no achievement of rights as all.
As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said:
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.If you achieve human rights or better consideration in one area, but at the expense of others, you are merely shuffling the hate around, not dealing with the fundamental problem.
Note 1
To give some background on this, the anti-discrimination provisions we succeeded in having passed included non-operative trans and gender diverse (TGD) people as well as post operative for a number of reasons (including the fact that others would not be able to differentiate, and the requirement of a real life test for those who wish to have surgery): however, Births, Deaths and Marriage clearly had problems with not discriminating, and advocated fiercely - and, whether they knew it or not, effectively hatefully - against carrying that over to the provision of documentation (despite the presentation of clear and compelling arguments for doing so - by us and others [this is a particular issue for intersex people]), which was restricted to post-operative people - and was problematic for many reasons.
Note2
The trans advocate concerned was, I should point out, extremely effective in at least one other area, however. (Also, the intersex response was also problematic, but I see that as an outcome of trying to survive against hate that included the trans action. This is, perhaps, similar to the hate many LGBTIQ+ people feel for religion, which has been the leading front of hate for millennia - understandable, but excludes and antagonises LGBTIQ+ people of faith.)
